Chapter 22

The Moon - 3751 C.E.

The Moon was the most substantial celestial body Paul had ever trodden on in all his eighty years of life in the Solar System. When Paul stepped out of the Milton's shuttle and onto the Moon's surface, his body was directly subject to a gravitational force that was just one sixth to what he was used to. Nevertheless, walking on the Moon was hardly effortless. Ungainly was the best description of Paul's forward locomotion when he tumbled face downwards onto the spaceport's thick carpeted floor.

The space ship Milton meanwhile was many kilometres away and circling high above Paul's head. A vessel of the Milton's size wasn't authorised to approach nearer to Earth than this. Risks could no longer be taken after the long distressing history of calamitous accidents involving space ships in terrestrial orbit. The most disastrous had caused more destruction than the very worst of the nuclear explosions that had periodically scarred the Earth's surface. Ever since Houston was annihilated by the cataclysmic collision of two space cruisers, no space ship of the Milton's dimensions was permitted any closer to Earth than the Moon. And even then it had to maintain an orbit of several thousand kilometres.

Paul was sure he should be thrilled about being on the Moon, but his most genuine enthusiasm was reserved for the blue satellite he could see above his head. He was sure he could discern the outline of the continents of Africa and South America. And weren't those clouds he could see over the brown continents and blue oceans?

"I don't think I've ever seen so many people!" gasped Beatrice as she stared through the windows of the walkway that led from the airstrip to the spaceport concourse.

Paul followed her gaze and noticed for the first time the teeming masses of the Moon. Beatrice and he were standing on the Moon's surface, but many kilometres beneath their feet were successive levels upon levels of streets, walkways, avenues and tall buildings. The surface area of the Moon might be much smaller than Earth's, but the lunar cities weren't restricted at all in their subsurface expansion. In fact the Moon's urban sprawl supported a much larger population than the whole of planet Earth.

Lunar citizens bobbed up and down in the low gravity when they walked as if it was the most natural thing in the Solar System. No amount of film footage of the Moon taken from any of its seventeen hundred years of colonisation properly prepared Paul for the awe-inspiring sight of thousands upon thousands of people hopping about like kangaroos under the glass domes that encased the greater part of the lunar surface.

Just the momentary distraction of taking his eyes off his stride was enough for Paul to once again trip forward onto the ground. However, he fell so slowly that he was less likely to hurt himself than the other more sure-footed pedestrians who warily avoided being in his vicinity. It wasn't strictly necessary to walk as he was being carried steadily forward by the moving walkway. Although it wouldn't take long for Paul and Beatrice to arrive at the reception area where Lieutenant Korolyov was waiting, Beatrice was in a peculiar hurry. It was difficult for Paul to keep up with her. This was especially so as she was already far better acclimatised to the low gravity than he was.

The Milton's shuttle had touched down on an airless open runway where it was now standing amongst hundreds of other lunar shuttles. Paul could glimpse behind him the occasional astronaut and the much larger number of scuttling robots dotted about the space craft in the bleak moon dust. The shuttles were overlooked from high above through the spaceport's windows and also those of the luxury penthouse suites where the Moon's most wealthy citizens lived.

The causeway trailed over and above the city of Nectaris, the second largest city on the Moon, and then through the walls of a four billion year old crater to overlook a barren plain. This served to remind Paul and Beatrice and the hundreds of others who were also making their way from the runway to the spaceport concourse that they were indeed on a hostile airless rock in space. Paul could see the distant bright lights that marked the site of a historic Twenty-Second century Lunar settlement known by the optimistic name of Plymouth, but which had shared more the unfortunate fate of the stillborn North American colony of Roanoke. A few space-suited tourists could be seen milling about in the crater's shadows.

Paul wanted to pause on the walkway to properly take in the beauty of this unique scene. There weren't many places in the Solar System with as much ancient history as Plymouth, except, of course, on the blue globe that shone above them in the sky and whose reflective light cast long shadows over the high crater walls.

Uncharacteristically, it was Beatrice who was the less inspired by such an evocative sight.

"We've got plenty of time to look at things like that later," she reminded Paul. "This is going to be our home for at least a month until we fly down to Earth."

"Oh come on, Beatrice," said Paul who'd been looking forward to looking at a view like this ever since he'd left Jupiter orbit. "I can't see what greater attraction our hotel suite could be."

"I'm tired," said Beatrice who rarely betrayed such human weaknesses. "It's been a long day."

Paul nodded, although the day had only been long because of the delay in boarding the Milton's shuttle. The departure was complicated by the pressing need to observe established protocol when the passenger list included trillionaires, diplomats and celebrities. Paul and Beatrice were undoubtedly the lowest ranked of all the passengers. The only people who had to wait behind them in the disembarkation queue were the waiters, bar-keepers and tourist guides. Just ahead was the Ambassador for Sycorax, a very minor moon colony of Uranus. Highest ranking of all was Buzzy Mao, a pop singer from the Jupiter orbit colony of Tyne who was fabulously popular in the Inner Solar System even though his fame hadn't quite spread as far as the Kuiper Belt. He was anticipating a rapturous welcome from his adoring fans on the Moon.

Such was Beatrice's pace that the newly-weds soon overtook the entourage of even the Ambassador of Amalthea who had dawdled by the viewpoint in the walkway that offered the best view of the ancient Plymouth colony. His various wives and husbands were gathered about him in their provocative and sexually explicit outfits.

It is rare for there to be much warning when a disaster happens.

The memory of the event often promotes an originally inauspicious event to the status of a retrospective alert.

Perhaps it was the woman who detached herself from the Amalthean ambassador's company and scurried along the walkway with renewed determination. Perhaps it was the small bag that lay only a few meters away from the huddle of Amalthean tourists. Perhaps it was the robotic vacuum cleaner that was steadily rolling along the edge of the rubberised walkway floor. Perhaps it was none of these.

But the actual event, like everything else on the Moon, happened in characteristic slow motion. The walkway between Paul and the Amalthean ambassador's dawdling entourage first folded in on itself and then rather more abruptly exploded outwards during which shards of glass and luxury carpeting were flung still relatively slowly into the near-vacuum outside. Paul's direct experience, as opposed to what he could later observe replayed at his leisure, was of an intense tug as the walkway's pressurised air pulled him backwards to where the Amaltheans were being sucked out through a widening fracture in the surrounding glass onto the bleak earthlit lunar dust. It wasn't the impact of landing on the dusty ground below that killed them even though they bounced several times off its surface to a height of several metres. They'd died well within the first second of the explosion from a combination of extreme cold, lack of atmospheric pressure and, most obviously, a total absence of breathable air.

This was a fate Paul could easily have shared. Like the scattered remnants of eerily exploded corpses restrained by fetishistic outfits that displayed genitalia and bosoms and were now much more grotesque and blood-splattered than provocative, Paul's body could have been tossed carelessly about the ground several tens of metres below. But once again Beatrice saved his life. And once more in a way that seemed more by chance than circumstance.

Paul somehow managed to be on just the right side of the emergency hatch that slammed shut well within a second of the walkway suddenly and unaccountably exploding. Paul later learnt that the walkway had always suffered from a design fault, so in a sense such a catastrophe was just waiting to happen. When towards the end of the third millennium the proud Lunar citizens built the long walkway that wound from the city of Nectaris to overlook the first settlement in the Mare of the same name, it was already known that a meteorite of little more than a few centimetres' width could easily crack open the glass surface. Even the centuries of reinforcement that now protected it from many times that scale of impact wasn't guaranteed to withstand the impact of a sizeable rock falling onto the Moon from the open sky. In any case, there were many other small objects that a potential terrorist could employ to shatter the protective glass. Once even the smallest kink cracked the surface, the combination of high internal air-pressure, a near vacuum outside and a dramatic temperature differential would turn the historic walkway into an inescapable death-trap.

And on this occasion there was no escape from death for all twenty-seven Amalthean delegates, a further dozen ancillary staff, and the High Priest of the Synod of Triton and his entourage who'd disembarked from another space-ship.

Paul and Beatrice were more fortunate. Beatrice had grabbed Paul by his collar just in time and heaved him through the walkway partition before it either sealed the couple on the wrong side of safety or, in its haste, severed their bodies in half. The distance to the walkway hatch that a moment ago seemed fifty or so metres away, suddenly became a whisker on the other side.

Paul didn't see much of the explosion. This was because he was lying prostrate on the carpet-covered floor of the walkway; or at least in one truncated branch of it. He was battered and bruised by the shock of being pushed to the ground before the hatch sealed itself behind him. The violence with which Beatrice grabbed his arm caused it to be torn by agony when he tried to pick himself. A sharp pain blanked out from his consciousness most of where he was and what had happened.

"You poor darling!" said Beatrice who was remarkably prompt in identifying the source of her husband's discomfort. She soothingly stroked his forearm while they slumped down on the ground. "How much does it hurt?"

"A lot!" said Paul.

"But at least we're alive," said Beatrice.

She turned her head round behind them and beckoned Paul to do the same. Through the transparent doorway that had slid into place they could see a stretch of glass corridor that protruded fifty metres over the dust-swept rocks below. Hanging to the jagged edges of shattered glass was an arm torn off at the sleeve and so frozen by the unmediated cold night air that the patches of blood had formed into dark crystals. The scattered bodies of other unfortunate passengers were below but too distant for Paul to identify. A few dozen bodies were slumped on the carpeted walkway killed more by the sudden cold and loss of air pressure than the impact of the explosion. The ruptured faces and burst eyeballs were evidence of a disagreeable but thankfully nearly instant death.